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Effect of Rehabilitation Service on Coping Patterns among Older Adults with Age- related Vision loss

Having been identified as the second most frequent cause of adulthood’s disability, age-related vision loss; a chronic impairment with gradual decline has been found to put individuals at risk of depression and poorer perceived life quality. It’s against this background of the negative impact of age related vision on the functional ability and social activities that this study seeks to establish the effects of different rehabilitation services on coping among the adults with age- related vision loss. However, there was bound to be a memory bias due to the self report nature of the rehabilitation data used in the study, and given the fact that only physically and mentally healthy participants were used for both the baseline and follow-up study, those who may have dropped out were not included in the study. In addition the in-depth understanding of the effect of different coping services was not possible since the study did not provide details of the vision rehabilitation services used.

A longitudinal two phase study in which a base lines sample of 155 respondents interviewed from their homes composed of adults aged over 65 years having been recently referred to a rehabilitation agency in the Newyork area. Follow-up interviews involving 61% of the original sample was conducted with the average coping patterns first examined using paired t- test to test the differences in coping between baseline time and the two year follow-up. Hierarchical regression was to assess the role of rehabilitation use in the prediction of changing over the two year follow-up. Counseling was found to have a higher effect on coping as it was found that participants who received counseling demonstrated a higher efficiency of coping. Additionally the nature of counseling done can also have an impact on the outcome of the counseling. In addition to this, it was found that the vision coping patterns can be affected by vision rehabilitation. Further to this, the use of optical aids like telescopes or magnifiers has been found to be helpful to adults with age- related visual l impairment since those who used a greater number of these optical aids reported more distraction coping over time. This would prolong their reliance on their eyesight. It was thought that optical aids enabled the participants of the study to focus on their strengths and capabilities rather than their shortcomings.

The interesting finding that consulting a low vision specialist had the opposite effect on this coping types is subject to further study since it was argued that the use of the optical aids would result from consulting these specialists eve n though the employing low vision services and the use of optical aids were not linked in the sense that those who paid a visit to a low vision specialist were not necessarily at an increased chance of using more optical aids. This demonstrates that there is a unique relationship between the increased use of optical aids and its effects on coping. This creates a need for future research coupled with the recent findings in order to identify the exact relationship between all the variables so as to enhance the efficiency of the different rehabilitation services in mitigating the negative effects of age-related vision loss problems in adults.

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